Since 2004, when it completed its stock-for-stock acquisition of Boston-based John Hancock Financial, Manulife has been a leading provider of financial services both in its native Canada,  across the United States and around the world. This month, using technology from Nuance Communications, the company’s Canadian subsidiary, Manulife Canda, has taken major strides toward embracing new “Intelligent Assistance” technologies by offering its customers a way to use their voice and their own words both to  authenticate themselves and to get secure, personalized service.
Since a video is worth 10,000 words, here’s the YouTube-based description of the new service:

 

Natural language interaction with the company’s automated system is being offered to customers of Manulife Bank. Voice-based authentication replaces PINs, passwords or other forms of “knowledge-based authentication” (KBAs) for Manulife financial advisors. Until this point, the company had used KBAs and defaulted to “challenge questions” in order to gain strong confidence in an individual’s identity. Yet Opus Research has conducted surveys that show that as many as 85% of individuals calling into a contact center find such an approach to authentication and verification to be a nuisance and have abandoned the process as a result.

The new system, which launched at Manulife Bank on July 27, relies on the passphrase “at Manulife my voice is my password” or its French equivalent, “À Manuvie, mon mot de passe, c’est ma voix,” which it understands both in international French as well as Canada’s own Québécois. Once authenticated, the system also enables callers to describe their intent using natural language, so that individual’s can describe their needs using terms with which they are most comfortable.

Manulife’s IVR system receives something on the order of 28,000 phone calls each day.

Categories: Intelligent Authentication, Articles

Tags: Voice biometrics, authentication, Customer Experieince, Natural Language, Manulife, naunce